Abstract
A central feature in the history of Western modernization has been an ever-increasing reliance on technology in manufacturing services, information processing, communication, education, health care, and public administration. This reliance was anticipated and enthusiastically embraced by the early founders of modernity, especially Bacon and Descartes, and finally (much later than they would have predicted) became a reality in the latter half of the nineteenth century. Moreover, increasing technological power proved an especially valuable asset in liberal democratic societies. The surplus wealth made possible by such power appeared to allow a more egalitarian society, even if great inequalities persisted; representatives of such technical power could exhibit, publicly demonstrate, and so justify their power in ways more compatible with democratic notions of accountability; and a growing belief in the “system” of production and distribution as itself the possible object of technical expertise seemed to make possible the promise of a great collective benefit, given proper “management,” arising from the individual pursuit of self-interest promoted by market economies.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
See Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958); Jürgen Habermas, Strukturwandel der öffentlichkeit (Berlin: Leuchterhand, 1962).
See inter alia, the essays in Michel Foucault, Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, ed. C. Gordon (New York: Pantheon, 1980).
See the historical account in Norman Stockman, Antipositivist Theories of the Sciences (Dordrecht: Reidel, 1983), Section 3.2, “Critical Theory’s Critique of Positivism: The Kantian Background,”,pp. 43–51. Stockman’s account should be supplemented by additional attention to the role of Lukacs. See Andrew Feenberg, Lukacs, Marx and the Sources of Critical Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981).
See the three types of “pejorative” ideology critiques identified by Raymond Geuss in The Idea of a Critical Theory: Habermas and the Frankfurt School (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), p. 13.
This theme appears in many of Heidegger’s later writings, but I shall treat as typical such essays as “The Age of the World Picture,” “The Word of Nietzsche: God is Dead,” and “The Turning,” in The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays (New York: Harper and Row, 1977), and the concluding lectures in the Nietzsche series, Nietzsche, Vol IV Nihilism, trans. D. Krell (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1982).
Jacques Ellul, The Technological Society, trans. J. Neugroschel (New York: Continuum, 1980).
Robert P. Pippin, Modernism as a Philosophical Problem: On the Dissatisfactions of European High Culture (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1991).
See the references above in n. 2, and the useful discussion in David Hoy, “Power, Repression, Progress: Foucault, Lukes, and the Frankfurt School,” in Foucault: A Critical Reader (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986), pp. 123–148.
For representative passages, see Karl Marx, Capital, ed. F. Engels, trans. Samuel Moore and Edward Aveling (New York: International Publishers, 1977), pp. 312–507, Vol. I, Part IV, “Production of relative Surplus Value,” especially Chapter XV, “Machinery and Modern Industry.” For the contrast between production under capitalism and after, see idem, Grundrisse, trans. Martin Nicolaus (New York: Vintage, 1973), p. 488.
M. Horkheimer and T. Adorno, The Dialectic of Enlightenment (New York: Seabury, 1972).
Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man (Boston: Beacon Press, 1964).
See Max Horkheimer, Eclipse of Reason (New York: Seabury, 1974), p. 176.
This is of course not true of the position developed by Adorno in Negative Dialectics, but that is another story. See my discussion in Modernism as a Philosophical Problem pp. 151–156, and Habermas’s statement of his differences with the Horkheimer-Adorno approach in The Theory of Communicative Action, trans. T. McCarthy (Boston: Beacon Press, 1984), Vol. I, IV.2, “The Critique of Instrumental Reason,” pp. 366-399; and in The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, trans. F. Lawrence (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1987), Chap. V, pp. 106–130.
See Stockman, Antipositivist Theories, pp. 57–64 and 240-246.
Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man, p. 154.
Andrew Feenberg, The Critical Theory of Technology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991).
Pippin, Modernism as a Philosophical Problem.
I am assuming that the modern enterprise does not merely seize the opportunity to extend a “natural,” species-characteristic interest in the control of nature through labor and tools, but that the early moderns began to reformulate the range of natural events that could be mastered, what could count as such mastery (given the new influence of mathematics and a new attention to the problem of certainty), what such mastery was for, and the relation between such a goal and other desirable social ends. Given such a claim, understanding why such reformulations occurred cannot be answered by appeal to a mere extension of such a species-characteristic interest. I am thus disagreeing with, e.g., Habermas’s account. See the discussion below.
Rene Descartes, Discourse on Method in The Philosophical Works of Descartes, trans. Elizabeth Haldane and G. R. T. Ross (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969), Vol. I, pp. 119–120. See Genesis 3:17.
Especially in Jürgen Habermas, “Technology and Science as Ideology,” in Toward a Rational Society, trans. J. Shapiro (Boston: Beacon Press, 1970) and in Vol. II of The Theory of Communicative Action, trans. T. McCarthy (Boston: Beacon Press, 1987).
Habermas, “Technology and Science as Ideology,” p. 87
See, for example, Habermas’s account of how “pressure” from the development of productive forces brings about, as if by hydraulic force, the end of traditional societies in “Technology and Science as Ideology,” p. 96.
Contrast the different account of the significance and unique characteristics of labor in the modern world in Ahrendt, The Human Condition, Chap. 3.
Among the many studies of this complicated intellectual development, see Hans Blumenberg, The Legitimacy of the Modern Age, trans. Robert Wallace (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1983), and Amos Funkenstein, Theology and the Scientific Imagination from the Middle Ages to the Seventeenth Century (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986). See also my “Blumenberg and the Modernity Problem,” Review of Metaphysics 40 (1987), 535-557, and Chap. 2 of Modernism as a Philosophical Problem.
See the account in David Lachterman, The Ethics of Geometry: A Genealogy of Modernity (New York: Routledge, 1989).
See the criticism of Habermas by Axel Honneth in Kritik der Macht: Reflexionstufen einer kritischen Gesellschaftstheorie (Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1985), and my “Hegel, Modernity and Habermas,” Monist 74 (July 1991), 329–357.
See Stockman’s account in Antipositivist Theories, pp. 109–112.
See the development of this theme in my “Marcuse on Hegel and Historicity,” in R. Pippin, A. Feenberg, and C. Webel (eds.), Marcuse: Critical Theory and the Promise of Utopia (London: Macmillan, 1988).
I am thinking here of Hans Blumenberg’s strategy and terms. See his The Legitimacy of the Modern Age.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 1994 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Pippin, R.B. (1994). On the Notion of Technology as Ideology: Prospects. In: Ezrahi, Y., Mendelsohn, E., Segal, H. (eds) Technology, Pessimism, and Postmodernism. Sociology of the Sciences, vol 17. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-011-0876-8_7
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-011-0876-8_7
Publisher Name: Springer, Dordrecht
Print ISBN: 978-94-010-4379-3
Online ISBN: 978-94-011-0876-8
eBook Packages: Springer Book Archive